Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Last Friday (1/25/08) it was my privilege to be in Texas, giving a workshop entitled "Fast Forward: Science Fiction," hosted by the Central Texas Library Systems, at the Georgetown Public Library. Here's the description:

"Lou Anders, Editorial Director of Pyr Books will share his vision of the future - and his knowledge of the Science Fiction genre – with CTLS member library staff, volunteers, board and Friends. Lou will discuss the various Sci Fi sub-genres and authors who are currently popular. He’ll also recommend authors and titles to include in a beginning Science Fiction core collection."

There were about 50 people in the audience, give or take. Some enthusiastic readers, some fans of media SF, some who'd never read it before. And me, basically trying to split the middle between media SF fans and those who wouldn't touch the stuff, trying to pull both sides towards an understanding of and appreciation for the literature. So, how did it go?

Awesome! I'd been warned that due to the horrendous nature of Friday traffic in Austin, I shouldn't be offended when folks made a beeline for the door come 3pm. Instead, they mobbed the front, asking about books and titles and authors. Many explained that they read SF as children and were now inspired to read again. Several said it was the most interesting topic they'd done so far. A few said their spouses read and now they didn't think it so strange...

Here I am with Pat Tuohy, Executive Director of Central Texas Library System (CTLS, Inc.). I'm sorry I didn't get a picture with Jennifer Patterson, who hired me, but she was too busy facilitating (and very well). She made the whole trip very enjoyable.

And as you can see, lots of the staff were decked out in Spock Ears, alien antennae, etc... One "Scully" from the X-Files that I thought was a real FBI agent for a nanosecond or two. (Some post-911 homeland security thing I don't know about libraries?) And here's a shot of an appropriately dejected Marvin from Hitchhiker's Guide. Plastic aliens and ray guns on every table, and a Star Wars "space cake" that was a very unhealthy looking chemical deep blue but quite tasty. Also a flutist playing "genre music'" during the lunch of "chicken in solar sauce!!" I had a blast!

Thursday night at the San Gabriel House was wonderful - a 1908 bed and breakfast across from Southwestern University. And thanks to Chris Roberson and Allison Baker for putting me up Friday night, and for John Picacio for trekking over from San Antonio to hang with us. Thanks to all and everyone for a great time.

"Michael Moorcock's The Metatemporal Detective(Pyr) is good pulp-fuelled fun, filled with stories that deftly pastiche many modes of popular fiction, though these tales might be somewhat arcane for readers not overly familiar with Moorcock's multiverse and his recurring cast of dimension-hopping characters and doppelgangers."

Monday, January 28, 2008

"On the science fiction side, Ian McDonald reaffirmed his excellence with Brasyl,which contains three separate narrative strands describing the Brazil of past, present, and future. The novel is a tour de force of storytelling momentum, with a level of invention that represents a master at the top of his form. McDonald is an amazing stylist, yes, but here it’s all about motion. He does a wonderful job of including his trademark detailed and inventive description while making sure nothing in this complex, often beautiful novel is static."

and

"Kay Kenyon's Bright of the Sky,after a slow first seventy pages, knocked my socks off with its brilliant evocation of a quest through a parallel universe that has a strange river running through it. Unique in conception, like Larry Niven's Ringworld, this is the beginning to what should be an amazing SF-Fantasy series."

From the Best Anthologies list:

" Another first volume of a new original series, the Lou Anders-edited Fast Forward 1 featured thought-provoking speculative takes on making sense of our (post)modern world by, among others, Ken MacLeod, Gene Wolfe, and Nancy Kress. Consistently interesting, this SF anthology fills a gap, as most of the current spate of anthologies seems skewed toward the fantasy side of things."

Monday, January 21, 2008

Over on Wired.com, I was delighted to see Clive Thompson on Why Sci-Fi Is the Last Bastion of Philosophical Writing. Perhaps guilty of a little hyperbole, Clive nonetheless warms the cockles of my heart when he declares that, "If you want to read books that tackle profound philosophical questions, then the best — and perhaps only — place to turn these days is sci-fi. Science fiction is the last great literature of ideas."

Clive opines that contemporary literature has "dropped the ball," postulating that, "After I'd read my 189th novel about someone living in a city, working in a basically realistic job and having a realistic relationship and a realistically fraught family, I ... started to feel like I'd been reading the same book over and over again."

Clive then asks why SF don't get no respect, and concludes that it's because of our high pain threshold for bad prose and outdated portrayals of women. He sees hope in the mainstream persons of Roth, McCarthy, Chabon and others who are taking up the SF paints.

But while I love to see the above roster of writers turning to our tools, I think we have our own prose stylists who can compete, and always have. Certainly I'd put the best of Sturgeon or Delaney up against anything today, and as for today, Ian McDonald can certainly hold his own alongside literary novels. In fact, not five minutes ago, I finished reading Paolo Bacigalupi's contribution to Fast Forward 2, a wonderful 10,000 word novelette called "The Gambler" which is going to blow you all away in October. He blogs about its genesis here. In the meantime, I'd love to know what Clive Thompson would make of either McDonald's Brasylor Bacigalupi's rapidly approaching collection, Pump Six and Other Stories. And Clive, if you find this on the Google Alert or the trackback, I'll gladly send you Fast Forward 1 now and 2 when it's out.

Thursday, January 17, 2008

Greg L. Johnson of SFSite has posted his Best of 2007 list, a list of "the ten science fiction and fantasy books that I liked the most in 2007." And wouldn't you know it, Pyr takes the # 2 and # 1 spot.

Greg's #2 choice for 2007 is Ian McDonald's Brasyl,of which he says, "With wit and stunning imagery, Ian McDonald takes us to a near-future, and a distant past, that is as strange as any alien world. ...a story that masterfully blends history, character, Portuguese street slang and cosmological speculation, meeting both the requirements of hard SF and literary style along the way."

And coming in at #1, Kay Kenyon's Bright of the Sky,which "lies somewhere between Gene Wolfe's The Book of the Sun and Karl Schroeder's Ventus, and was, for me, the one book of the year that, once I started reading, was impossible to put down."

Thursday, January 10, 2008

If I was on the fence about Gawker's new io9.com blog, this piece on Borderlands Books has put me over the edge. This kind of support for /shout out to independent booksellers is fantastic. And Borderlands is the perfect store to kick it off. When I lived in San Francisco, I made a point of going weekly, and really miss the readings there.

But I wasn't really on the fence, after reading this from editor Annalee Newitz: “We don’t see it as a niche entertainment site. We see it as a pop culture site. So much of our mainstream culture is now talked about and thought about in science-fictional terms. I think that’s why people like William Gibson and Brian Aldiss are saying there’s no more science fiction because we are now living in the future. The present is thinking of itself in science-fictional terms. You get things like George Bush taking stem cell policy from reading parts of Brave New World. That’s part of what we are playing with. We are living in world that now thinks of itself in terms of sci-fi and in terms of the future.”

Meanwhile, as readers of this blog will know, I often bemoan the discrepancies between SF literature and cinema, so I'm delighted to know that Joseph is such an avid and informed reader of science fiction and fantasy books. If everyone in Hollywood were like him, we'd have a much different industry.

Wednesday, January 09, 2008

Another great Mind Meld from SFSignal. I'm not in "Today's SF Authors Define Science Fiction (Part 1)", but you know it's a topic near and dear to me. Best answers this time out are by Matthew Jarpe, Chris Roberson, Adam Roberts, and Paul Di Filippo. By "best" I mean most useful, to me, in my subjective opinion and for my own purposes in articulating why I work in this field and not in the mystery/thriller genre or something else. Which is not to disagree with those who describe SF as a marketing category, or a nonexistent territory, or a set of fun props. Because, as John Scalzi points out, it is all those things too, and rises above them on a case by case basis solely on the skill level and intent of its practitioner.

You can probably guess how I feel about this, "There's nothing special about science fiction, just as there's nothing special about any other movement or genre out there." But I'm working on both a talk I have to give at the end of this month on this very topic, AND the introduction for Fast Forward 2, so I'll save my response/energy for those.

I woke up to some big news this morning. Adam Roberts' Gradisilhas been short-listed for the Philip K. Dick Award. This is fantastic, and utterly deserved - I've been a big fan of Adam's long before I edited him, and I'm absolutely thrilled.

Also very happy for my friends Sean Williams and Elizabeth Bear, and my new friend Jon Armstrong. I read Grey last year and loved it. Congrats to everybody!

Here's the full press release:

2007 Philip K. Dick Award Nominees Announced

The judges of the 2007 Philip K. Dick Award and the Philadelphia SF Society are pleased to announce seven nominated works that comprise the final ballot for the award:

First prize and any special citations will be announced on Friday, March 21, 2008 at Norwescon 31 at the Doubletree Hotel Seattle Airport, SeaTac, Washington.

The Philip K. Dick Award is presented annually with the support of the Philip K. Dick Trust for distinguished science fiction published in paperback original form in the United States. The award is sponsored by the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society and the award ceremony is sponsored by the NorthWest Science Fiction Society. Last year's winner was SPIN CONTROL by Chris Moriarty (Bantam Spectra) with a special citation to CARNIVAL by Elizabeth Bear(Bantam Spectra). The 2007 judges are Steve Miller, Chris Moriarty (chair), Steven Piziks, Randy Schroeder, Ann Tonsor Zeddies.

Monday, January 07, 2008

The Times Online have just released their list of The 50 Greatest British Writers Since 1945. Quite a few genre names on the list, including Tolkien, Lewis, Pullman and Rowling, and also, coming in at number 50, our own Michael Moorcock. They say, " Most of Moorcock’s 80-plus novels are unashamedly pulp. But he wins his place for a series of genre-crossing novels linked by a taste for metafictional devices — he often appears in them himself and characters occur and recur in 'historical' and 'fantasy' guises." They discuss his major works and his influences on such notables as William Gibson, Neil Gaiman, Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd.

Meanwhile, Andrew McKie reviews The Metatemporal Detectivefor the Telegraph, in a piece called "Michael Moorcock: His Own Private Multiverse." McKie opens by crediting Moorcock with bringing the term Multiverse to quantum physicists and philosophers, then describes his latest as, "tremendous fun for fans of Sherlock Holmes, or perhaps Sexton Blake, so long as they are prepared for occasional forays into the milieu of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, as well as Robert E Howard, creator of Conan the Barbarian... This is all pastiche, and Moorcock's fans will not be surprised to find that it is astoundingly sure-footed....I think it, on the whole, terrific. "

So first Mark Harris writes "Is Sci-Fi Out of Ideas?" on EW.com, using the occasion of I Am Legend and its proposed sequel to lambest Hollywood for all the remakes. He writes, "It's one thing to revere and refresh a genre's history; it's another to live obsessively in the past, especially if science fiction's whole purpose is to extrapolate elements from today's world to create a future we've never imagined. When it comes to spaceships, giant monsters from afar, cloning, and robots, we've now been there, done that, remade it, added new CGI, seen the director's cut, played the videogame, read the fan fiction, and bought the collectibles. Where do we go from here? The answer always seems to be that we jump backwards, into the same old Cold War/Apollo-mission-era tropes."

I agree whole-heartedly with his diagnosis of the problem. I'm not 100% in agreement with his solution: "Perhaps science fiction needs to be saved from the very people who love it the most. Nostalgia for a form can be annihilating to creativity, so while its devotees are swamped in their own canon, trying to mine now-sacred texts for any new material, I wish a great writer or director with no particular affection for the genre would let his imagination loose and see what it yields...Ideally, sci-fi's next rescuer should be someone whose ideas about the future derive from somewhere — anywhere — other than old sci-fi. ... Sci-fi desperately needs filmmakers who are interested in bending the form toward their own passions and obsessions as artists. 2001 has come and gone, and right now the future looks too much like something we've already seen."

It's not that I disagree with this. It's that I think there's another part of the solution. Fortunately, Marc Bernardin pops up on EW's Popwatch Blog with "An Open Letter to the Sci-Fi Channel," in which he charges, "Why aren't you engaging today's premiere purveyors of genre material and giving them ten episodes to do whatever the hell they want? I'd watch contained, BBC-style series from folks like Neil Gaiman, William Gibson, John Scalzi, Cory Doctorow, Warren Ellis, Charlie Huston, Neal Stephenson, or China Mieville. The names alone would attract viewers by the truckload. And even if what they produced were failures, they'd be interesting failures—marked by reaching too far, instead of not far enough."

I hope someone is listening. Since this is on EW, I think there is a good chance someone is.

Thursday, January 03, 2008

I just this minute finished reading The Solaris Book of New Fantasy,edited by George Mann, and I have to say that I am very impressed. I liked 13 out of 16 stories - which is as good a number as I ever get from an anthology. What's more - I understood and applauded the reason for the inclusion of the three I wasn't wowed by. What George has done, and what makes this anthology so useful to me personally, is to take a very comprehensive, catholic view of the fantasy field. Rather than produce a book entirely composed of traditional fantasy or entirely composed of literary/slipstream fantasy, he's put out an anthology showcasing a broad range of fantasy offerings. As such, this makes the anthology a wonderful overview of the current state of the field (perhaps even a more accurate one than a Year's Best collection might present, with its understandable slant towards literary works) - and a whole lot easier for this busy editor to read than trying to sample a score of tome-sized fantasy novels would be. Looking at the TOC, I really liked 11 of the stories quite a lot, enjoyed 2 more, and, as I said, appreciated the inclusion of the three I didn't like for the education in what's out there they've afforded me. Stand out stories in my opinion are: Mark Chadbourn's "Who Slays the Gyant, Wounds the Beast," Jeff Vandermeer's "King Tales," Christopher Barzak's "In Between Dreams," Mike Resnick's "Shell Game," Jay Lake's, "A Man Falls," Scott Thomas' "Lt. Privet's Love Song," and Lucius Shepherd's "Chinandega." Yes, that's a lot of stand out stories. And the others are close behind. I liked the book that much. And I'm very glad to see it doing well, as it's made my yearly required reading list.

Over on his blog On the Front, John Picacio posts his published 2007 works. (A lot of John's 2007 was devoted to the forthcoming Elric The Stealer of Souls,but you have to wait another month to see that. The list are just those works which appeared on books published during the 2007 calendar year.) Check out the list - it's quite impressive and quite beautiful.

Wednesday, January 02, 2008

Another SF Signal Mind Meld post is up. This one, "If the SF/F Community Ran Hollywood..." has contributions from Chris Roberson, Paul Levinson, Angela @ SciFiChick, John C. Wright, Jayme Lynn Blaschke and Yours Truly. All comments well worth reading, but it all boils down to the fact that we'd all like Hollywood to be smarter and to put story telling above other concerns. Still, the overall vibe seems to be that there is a LOT more good out there than there was even a few years ago...

Tuesday, January 01, 2008

...since we launched the Pyr science fiction & fantasy imprint in March, 2005. So as we leave 2007 and enter 2008, I thought I'd take a look back on some of the highlights thus far. This is a list I made some months back and which you've seen a shorter version of before, and which I update from time to time. Totally cool if you just want to skim this, but it blows my mind we haven't yet closed out our third year:

Frostborn

Thrones and Bones

About Me

Lou Anders is the author of the Thrones and Bones series, a middle grade fantasy adventure that begins with the novel Frostborn, published by Random House’s Crown Books for Young Readers. He is a Hugo award winning editor and a Chesley Award winning art director, with six additional Hugo nominations, six additional Chesley nominations, three World Fantasy award nominations, a Shirley Jackson award nomination and a Philip K. Dick award nominations. For ten years, he served as the editorial director of Pyr books. Additionally, he is the editor of nine anthologies, including Swords & Dark Magic (Eos, 2010, with Jonathan Strahan), and Masked (Gallery Books, 2010). He is the author of The Making of Star Trek: First Contact (Titan Books, 1996), and has published over 500 articles in such magazines as The Believer, Publishers Weekly, Dreamwatch, DeathRay, Star Trek Monthly, Star Wars Monthly, Babylon 5 Magazine, Sci Fi Universe, Doctor Who Magazine, and Manga Max. His articles and stories have been translated into Russian, Spanish, Danish, Greek, German, Italian & French.